Cue the blood-curdling screams

By Jay Ashley / Times-News

Published: Friday, October 26, 2012 at 03:47 PM.

Halloween, heh? Costumes, blood, zombies. Pretty scary.

You want scary?

Then you must have salivated at this week’s story how the Italians, those wonderful and enlightened people who brought you the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, sent seven scientists to prison for seven years for failing to adequately warn residents of the risks before an earthquake struck central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people. You know the young Seismology majors there must be dreading the Augury & Prophecy finals. U.S. weather forecasters surely are breathing a sigh of relief they didn’t get a little jail time after Hurricane Katrina knocked out the levees in New Orleans.

Enjoy spooky stories about black magic? Then you surely clipped the story out of Nigeria a few years ago about the vigilante villagers who took a black and white goat to police, claiming it was a human armed robber who had used black magic to change himself into a goat to elude captors, which obviously did not work. A state police spokesman, the official voice of reason, had this to say about that: "We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody."

Want some supernatural? This year the end of the world is supposed to be Dec. 21, a revelation courtesy of the Mayans who are either blessed with God’s infinite vision or ran out of papyrus paper when they were putting together their annual Mesoamercian Long Count Christmas calendar. Or maybe this is a Mayan mistake and merely signals the end of one era and the beginning of another. It’s admittedly all still kind of up in the air, but since Dec. 21 is on a Friday and since the Mayans don’t have the juice and clout they once enjoyed, I’m not holding my breath or trading in my hover car for a camel until Mother Nature’s GPS tells me, on Dec. 22, that she is “recalculating” and I am expected to get out from under my bed and produce another Sunday column.

I used to get a kick out of scary movies when I was a kid and I remember my mother telling me how frightening that 1931 version of Frankenstein was. The next generation had “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein” and we had Steve McQueen and Miss Crump in “The Blob” and a whole raft of sci-fi terror-from-outer-space films. We also had William Castle, the king of interactive film experiences. Mr. Castle put buzzers under the seats for “The Tingler” and in a showing of “House On Haunted Hill” at the Paramount, a plastic day-glo skeleton went flying along the ceiling at a critical point in the flick. It was so cheesy we threw our popcorn boxes at it.

I lost interest in horror films around the time filmmakers started relying on limbs being chopped off and buckets of blood being spit at the camera. The nail in the coffin was when Herman Munster got slashed to death by a toddler who was buried — then resurrected — from a “pet semetary” long enough to give poor Herman a hickey as he breathed his last.

Then you must have salivated at this week’s story how the Italians, those wonderful and enlightened people who brought you the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, sent seven scientists to prison for seven years for failing to adequately warn residents of the risks before an earthquake struck central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people. You know the young Seismology majors there must be dreading the Augury & Prophecy finals. U.S. weather forecasters surely are breathing a sigh of relief they didn’t get a little jail time after Hurricane Katrina knocked out the levees in New Orleans.

Enjoy spooky stories about black magic? Then you surely clipped the story out of Nigeria a few years ago about the vigilante villagers who took a black and white goat to police, claiming it was a human armed robber who had used black magic to change himself into a goat to elude captors, which obviously did not work. A state police spokesman, the official voice of reason, had this to say about that: "We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody."

Want some supernatural? This year the end of the world is supposed to be Dec. 21, a revelation courtesy of the Mayans who are either blessed with God’s infinite vision or ran out of papyrus paper when they were putting together their annual Mesoamercian Long Count Christmas calendar. Or maybe this is a Mayan mistake and merely signals the end of one era and the beginning of another. It’s admittedly all still kind of up in the air, but since Dec. 21 is on a Friday and since the Mayans don’t have the juice and clout they once enjoyed, I’m not holding my breath or trading in my hover car for a camel until Mother Nature’s GPS tells me, on Dec. 22, that she is “recalculating” and I am expected to get out from under my bed and produce another Sunday column.

I used to get a kick out of scary movies when I was a kid and I remember my mother telling me how frightening that 1931 version of Frankenstein was. The next generation had “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein” and we had Steve McQueen and Miss Crump in “The Blob” and a whole raft of sci-fi terror-from-outer-space films. We also had William Castle, the king of interactive film experiences. Mr. Castle put buzzers under the seats for “The Tingler” and in a showing of “House On Haunted Hill” at the Paramount, a plastic day-glo skeleton went flying along the ceiling at a critical point in the flick. It was so cheesy we threw our popcorn boxes at it.

I lost interest in horror films around the time filmmakers started relying on limbs being chopped off and buckets of blood being spit at the camera. The nail in the coffin was when Herman Munster got slashed to death by a toddler who was buried — then resurrected — from a “pet semetary” long enough to give poor Herman a hickey as he breathed his last.

My closest real-life encounter with a horror movie is through my dentist. He played one of the congregants in “Children of the Corn II – The Final Sacrifice,” which was unceremoniously snubbed by the Oscars. That movie was filmed in parts of Randolph and Alamance counties. He spent several tedious hours being sprayed with corn syrup blood and cleaned up for take after take. Now the only blood he deals with comes out of gums such as mine. Now that’s scary.

To usher you out, here’re the titles and plots of a few scary movies, drawn from life experience, that I would like to see produced:

“The Candidate That Wouldn’t Quit.” The story of an early voter who can’t escape from the newspaper or TV ads, robo phone calls or emails after he’s pulled the lever, driving him/her stark raving mad.

“The Scariest Book Ever Written.” Story of the compilation of the Merck Manual, the book your physician goes into private to consult after examining you and the book that can make you develop every exotic illness known to man if you read it on your own.

“Terror in the Engine.” Story of a man with a ’59 T-Bird that mysteriously keeps burning out generators.

“The Pail Disaster.” Family runs out of Huggies and is forced to use cloth diapers again.

“Fear Takes A Vacation.” A man forfeits 380 hours in accumulated sick time and 100 hours of vacation time when another company buys his employer out.